Scorsese to build robot boy

Audiences might still be waiting on his latest big-screen venture Shutter Island, following the decision to yank it back from its original October 2009 release date to 19 February this year, but Martin Scorsese is certainly not letting the grass grow under his little feet. In addition to dabbling in the world of TV, he is also lining up a first venture into the realm of family film-making, in the shape of The Invention of Hugo Cabret.

Now that The Departed has seen Scorsese finally relinquish his long-held tag as 'The Best American Director Apart From Stanley Kubrick Never To Win An Oscar', he seems in the mood to dip his toes into fresh waters (and thankfully stop battering the poor cinema-going populace with the likes of The Aviator, a three-hour $100m stately begging plea to the Academy to give him some trophies). The Taxi Driver and Raging Bull maestro is helming the pilot episode and serving as executive producer for hotly-tipped new HBO show Boardwalk Empire, starring Steve Buscemi and set in prohibition-era Atlantic City, and according to Variety he is also in talks to direct a live-action adaptation of award-winning children's book The Invention of Hugo Cabret.

With the project being developed under the aegis of GK Films, The Invention of Hugo Cabret would see Scorsese reunited with Graham King, his Oscar-winning producer on The Departed. A screenplay is apparently already in place, with Aviator scripter John Logan having adapted the book, and Variety suggests that the film is being fast-tracked to start shooting in London from 1 June.

The original book incarnation of The Invention of Hugo Cabret by writer-illustrator Brian Selznick (a relation of legendary Gone With the Wind producer David O. Selznick) was originally published in 2007, and won the prestigious Caldecott Medal in 2008. It is lengthy for a kid's tome, weighing in at 500 pages-plus, but this is not simply an example of the post-Potter tendency for children's novels to be of a length and density that makes Gravity's Rainbow look like a bit of light bedtime reading; rather Selznick's book is fleshed out with a wealth of pencil illustrations (284 in total), which do not merely complement the text – they are a critical component in the telling of the story.

So what of that story? What is The Invention of Hugo Cabret all about? Well our boy HC is an a 12-year-old orphan (is DiCaprio too old-looking to be cast as a 12-year-old? What if he shaves off his doodle-beard?), living in the walls of the Gare Montparnasse in 1931 Paris, and trying to repair an automaton left to him by his now-dead clockmaker dad. With Hugo living the life of a ratboy-morlock, cash is scarce. So in order to acquire the bits and widgets that can hopefully make his inherited dohickey whirr into life, he steals from a toy store situated within the station, owned by an old man who just happens to be father of science fiction cinema, Monsieur Le Voyage dans la Lune himself George Méliès (this part of the story is actually based in fact; following the 1913 bankruptcy that ended his film-making career, Méliès did indeed operate a small toy store at the Gare Montparnasse from 1925 to 1932). Mysterious drawings, notebooks, keys, secret messages, oddball contraptions and Hugo's nasty old uncle all proceed to come together in a whopper of an adventure, as young Master Cabret and new sidekick Isabelle try to win the day and still make it home in time for tea and Hannah Montana.

As that summary might suggest, Hugo Cabret would signal something of a fresh adventure for Scorsese, being a tale neither drenched in Catholic guilt or featuring middle-aged Italian-American gentlemen who nurse an especial predilection for a four-letter word that rhymes with 'duck'. At the mere age of 67, this would both be Scorsese's first movie with incontrovertible all-the-family appeal, as well as his first step into that sub-genre most beloved by sci fi writers – the wild and wacky world of the automaton (although Tom Cruise in The Color of Money does have a minor automaton-esque quality about him). And yet, putting aside the faint but still oh-so painful echoes of A.I. triggered by this project, human automatons do possess a factual basis, having been quite the entertainment shizzle back in the 18th and 19th centuries before the invention of high-definition television and Facebook. One of the most famous was the chess-playing Turk, built by Wolfgang von Kempelen in 1770, and who subsequently crossed paths with the likes of Philidor, Napoleon Bonaparte, Benjamin Franklin and Edgar Allen Poe. Okay, so in the end it turned out that the Turk was no more a functioning machine than C-3PO or a Twiki off of Buck Rogers, and Kempelen had in fact just built a phoney robot for a diminutive chess-whizz to sweat inside. But the point remains that automatons built to mimic organic lifeforms did genuinely exist as a pre-20th century showbiz staple.

And besides, the presence of Méliès in a tale that Selznick has admitted also draws influences from the cinematic likes of Truffaut's 400 Blows and Jean Vigo's Zero for Conduct is surely a huge lure for maniacal cinephile Scorsese. Yelling into a megaphone on an adaptation of The Invention of Hugo Cabret would give him great opportunity to pay expansive and explicit tribute to the history of movies, and that is something the venerable Mr. S seems to like doing almost as much as Joe Pesci's character in Goodfellas likes using a bit of blue language and beating the tar out of people.